This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story.
With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19
‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep with anyone before marriage. So, aged just 19, she married a smooth-talking Armenian, Johnnie Sarkisian, and Cher, née Cherilyn, was born on 20 May 1946. But Johnnie soon disappeared, leaving Jackie Jean penniless, and Cher was consigned to a Catholic children’s home. Jackie then married again – and again, and again. Cher says she can’t remember whether there were seven or eight husbands, but the one she called Dad was husband number three, who lasted from when she was four until she was nine and provided a rare patch of stability in her life. He also gave her a half-sister, Gee, and they ‘have a bond that has lasted our whole lives’.
But then Johnnie turned up again and said the reason he hadn’t been in touch was because he’d been in prison for heroin-dealing (‘Addiction doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops’) and Jackie Jean remarried him. They went to live with his Armenian family in Fresno, who were all thrilled to have their missing grandchild back. But Johnnie soon resumed his heroin and gambling addictions and also set their house on fire, so that was the end of him.
Jackie Jean then married a very rich man, Gilbert, who adopted Cher and Gee and did everything possible to help them. He bought a house in Encino and settled the girls in school. But Cher never took to school – she didn’t read a book until she was 17 – and dropped out for good when she was 15 and went to drama school. She loved her coach Jeff Corey, who told her: ‘You’re an actor and I’m so proud of you.’
She lost her virginity to a neighbour, but found it ‘a massively overrated experience’. Still aged 15, she was almost run down by Warren Beatty. He was 25 and ‘so drop-dead gorgeous I had to steady myself as he walked back towards me’. He took her to his place and she didn’t get home till 4 a.m. Mom was furious, but Beatty phoned the next day and spoke to her, whereupon she ‘melted in front of my eyes’ and told her daughter that of course it was all right to go out with him. But Cher only did so twice, before, in November l962, she met Sonny Bono and ‘everyone else in the room faded’.
Sonny was a divorced Sicilian with a four-year-old daughter, Christy. He told Cher she could stay in his apartment if she cooked and cleaned: she need not worry about him pouncing, because ‘I honestly don’t find you particularly attractive’. But then one day he heard her singing while she was doing the housework and exclaimed: ‘You can really sing!’ He was working with Phil Spector at the time, so he took her along to the studio and Spector employed her as a backing singer for many of his most celebrated songs, including ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ’.
Being hired by Spector didn’t mean that Cher saw any money, since all her earnings were taken by Sonny – who told her she was getting a great musical education. But then, as Sonny & Cher, they made ‘Baby Don’t Go’ and ‘I Got You Babe’, and Ahmet Ertegun signed them to Atlantic Records. Mick Jagger told them they’d do well in the UK, so they flew to London – but were refused entry to the Hilton because of their hippy clothes. By lucky chance, a.k.a. cunning PR, they were papped being thrown out of the hotel, and the next day their photo was in all the papers. They were instantly booked for TV interviews and Top of the Pops, and ‘I Got You Babe’ knocked the Beatles’ ‘Help!’ off the number one spot. When they flew home a fortnight later they found 5,000 screaming fans at the airport in New York. Success had arrived, and Cher was only 19.
Everyone assumed Sonny and Cher were married at the time, but they weren’t. They had to secretly summon a judge to marry them at home when Cher found herself pregnant with Chastity. An author’s note explains that Chastity is now Chaz, but has given his permission to be known as Chas in this first volume. Cher eventually split from Sonny after a long tussle and developed her own TV show. And then went into acting and won an Oscar. But that will have to wait for the second instalment.
She remarks at one point: ‘It’s hard to explain complicated people, and everyone in my life seemed to be so complicated and fragile, always acting out – me included. In fact, I might be the queen of all that.’
Quite. I’m not sure she’s the most reliable narrator, and sometimes her stories seem too good to be true. But this is certainly an amazing memoir. I keenly await Part Two.
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